Seizing the Lord’s Yoke and Learning Jesus, 15th Thursday (I), July 15, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY
Thursday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Bonaventure, Bishop and Doctor
July 15, 2021
Ex 3:13-20, Ps 105, Mt 11:28-30

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Yesterday we focused on how God reveals himself and seeks to enter into a personal relationship with us but in order for that to occur we must have a childlike receptivity through entering into Jesus’ own filiation. Today in the readings, Jesus deepens the understanding we need to have of those realities and shows us ever more the means. He gives us three powerful verbs to characterize the means by which he seeks to incorporate us into his own childlike sonship.
• The first is “come”: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened.” The way we are going to be able to learn how to grow more deeply in spiritual childhood is precisely through our labors and burdens, through our hardships and sacrifices. These experiences make us run to God the Father like a young child hearing powerful thunder for the first time runs to earthly parents. Jesus gives us this invitation to enter as children more and more deeply into God’s revelation precisely through all that we’re going through, through all the various obstacles and challenges. He says if we do, he will give us “rest,” he will “refresh” us. The word translated “refresh” (or poorly translated as “give us rest,” which we are tempted to misinterpret as inactivity) actually means “remake.” Jesus wants to give us a fresh start, a new beginning, to bring us back to our spiritual infancy. In Psalm 23, we pray in anticipation of this remaking, “The Lord is my Shepherd. There is nothing I lack. In green pastures you lead me to grace and besides restful waters you refresh [remake] me.” He thoroughly remakes us in his image in baptism and that life is meant to continue. And he does that not by removing us from work and difficulties but precisely through our labors and hardships. We see this in what he does with the Israelites in the first reading. They are laboring under the burdens of Pharaoh and God comes to their aid. He seeks to remake them as a people, to remind them of their childhood though Abraham, Isaac and Jacob so that they might recognize their divine filiation, and he leads them to the waters of the Red Sea that prefigure baptism.
• The second action Jesus commands is to “take” or “assume.” Jesus tells us “Take my yoke upon you.”  Jesus doesn’t tell us to bend down and let him put the yoke on us. He wants us to seize it. He wants us to want it. What’s that yoke? We know that a yoke is a harness — Jesus doubtless used the make them as a carpenter in Joseph’s shop in Nazareth —  to unite two animals so that they might work in tandem. Jesus wants us to take up “his” yoke and his yoke is the patibulum of the Cross. Later he’ll say that his yoke is “easy,” which means that it is “easy-fitting,” it’s tailor-made, for us, to unite us to him, like the Cross on Calvary was the shoe that fit perfectly Simon of Cyrene’s feet. In the first reading, God revealed himself to Moses as “I Am Who Am,” and Jesus is the incarnation of the great “I Am.” But he revealed him most precisely in his passion and he wants us to pick up our Cross every day so we might be yoked to him with the yoke of the Cross from the inside out.  In St. John’s Gospel, Jesus mentions that he is I AM on several occasions linked to his Passion. He says, “When you lift up the Son of Man [obviously on the Cross!], then you will realize that I AM” (Jn 8:28), saying that “if you do not believe that I AM, you will die in your sins” (Jn 8:24). He takes away our sins when we yoke ourselves to the mercy of I AM. With regard to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he said to the Jews in the Temple who were plotting to murder him, “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM” (Jn 8:58). During the Last Supper, after he reveals that one of them will be his betrayer, he says, “I am telling you before it happens, so that when it happens you may believe that I AM” (Jn 13:18). Later, when Jesus is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, in the middle of his Passion, he asks the group of 200 soldiers who had come for him who they were looking for. When they said, “Jesus of Nazareth,” Jesus replied, “I AM” and we’re told that all of these armed men fell over because of the power of what was said, as if they grasped what he was indicating (Jn 18:5). We will come to know Christ personally, to know God personally, to experience his life, his immanent relations and the relationship he desires to have with us, precisely through yoking ourselves to him. But there’s another aspect of this yoke which is very important to ponder. To be yoked with Jesus is literally to be con (with) jugum (yoke), to be his spouse, his conjugal partner. When Jesus says “Come,” he’s proposing; and when he says “Take,” we’re called to respond, “I take you as my spouse, … for better or worse, in sickness or in health, all the days of my life.” To be yoked to Jesus means to live the spousal Covenant with Jesus all our days, and when we are living together with him, we find that our burdens are light and sweet because of the mutual love with Jesus that changes their weight and bitterness. That spousal covenant with Christ is consummated on the marriage bed of the Cross and that is the way, St. Edith Stein teaches us, that we become Brides of Christ on the Cross.
• The third way we grow in spiritual childhood to receive God’s revelation, Jesus says, is to “learn from me for I am meek and humble of heart and you will find rest for yourselves.” The way we learn from Jesus is not in a classroom seated on a chair. It’s by being yoked in this loving covenantal bond with Jesus. And when we are living in that union, then we not only learn “from” Jesus, but, as the Greek of St. Matthew’s Gospel says more literally, we learn Jesus. He tells us to “learn me.” We learn his humility, which is the capacity to see ourselves as we really are before God and others and how much we need God. We learn his meekness, which is the self-disciplined tameness that allows us calmly to find our strength in Him. We’ve got so much to learn from him, but we first must come, take on his yoke, spousally uniting ourselves to him permanently, and then we will learn from him all we need.
• Today the Church celebrates the feast of a saint who heeded Jesus’ triple command and learned him so well that he has been able, ever since, as a doctor of the Church, to teach others how to come to Jesus, to become united with him, and to learn and live his humility, meekness and other virtues. When St. Bonaventure was a young man, he found it hard to welcome the Lord because he was obsessed with his own sins and sinfulness. Even though later spiritual directors wondered whether he had ever committed a mortal sin, all he could see were his moral defects, failures and poor choices for which he was constantly doing penance and mortification. He was focused on himself rather than on God, trying to take responsibility rather than relating to God as a beloved son. Eventually he was cured of this form of scrupulosity through learning to welcome and trust fully in the Lord’s mercy, and he spent the rest of his life trying to help others similarly to relate to the Lord with loving trust. We have in the Office of Readings this morning a powerful passage from his most famous spiritual work, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, “The Journey of the Soul into [the very life of] God.” It’s really a commentary on the way of spiritual childhood in contrast to the way of the “wise and the clever.” In order to learn Jesus, to enter into deeper relationship with him, we must seek him, paradoxically, “in God’s grace, not in doctrine; in the longing of the will, not in the understanding; in the sighs of prayer, not in research; the Bridegroom not the Teacher; God and not man; darkness not daylight; and look not to the light but rather to the raging fire that carries the soul to God with intense fervor and glowing love.” In the world we often place emphasize what we can do, what we’ve learned, what we’ve understood, our own study, the light rather than the unknowing darkness, but St. Bonaventure lays out for us the path of how Jesus reveals is found in burdens, labors, the Cross, humility and meekness. He leads and remakes us through grace, longing, prayer, darkness and burning, spousal love. St. Bonaventure goes on to say that for us truly to enter into God we must die to the old Adam in us through entering into Jesus’ Paschal Mystery, through taking up our cross and following him: “Let us die, then,” he continues, “and … pass over with the crucified Christ from this world to the Father.” Christ on the Cross reveals the Father’s merciful love to us in the most powerful way and the more we enter into that mystery with childlike trust, the more God is able to turn our tears, sufferings and everything else into joy.
• The great place where we respond to Jesus’ invitation to receive God’s self-revelation within the mystery of his own divine filiation, the way we seize Christ’s spousal yoke of the Cross and learn him, is here at Mass. It’s at Mass that Jesus says,  “Come to me, all you who labor and find life burdensome, and I will refresh you.” He seeks to remake us here by his word, by his own body and blood, by his community, so that in this two-fold communion we might face all those labors and burdens. It’s here at Mass that he says, “Take my yoke upon you.” This is where we enter into a conjugal union, a yoke together with him, from the inside out. It’s here at Mass he says, “Learn me,” as he seeks to teach us and make us sharers in all his virtues, particularly his humility, meekness and compassion. It’s through Holy Communion that we become one with him as the great teacher continues to teach and remake us so that we may together with him bear abundant fruit that will last. Before Mass, the last prayer a priest says as he is vesting is over the chasuble he dons, and it’s all about this mystery of yoking ourselves to Christ in the Mass. The priest prays, “Domine, qui dixisti iugum meum suave est, et onus meum leve: fac, ut istud portare sic valeam, quod consequar tuam gratiam. Amen”: “Lord you have said, ‘My yoke is sweet and My burden light,’ grant that I may be worthy so carry [this yoke] as to obtain your grace.” We pray for the grace to carry the yoke of the Lord, to carry the Cross, to unite ourselves fully to the Passion, like St. Bonaventure, as he has taught us to do through his famous thanksgiving prayer Transfige. That is our prayer as the Lord, each day, seeks to make all our burdens sweet and light through our uniting them to him for the salvation of the world.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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